


How to Fall

by sunless



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Drug Addiction, Insomnia, M/M, Multiple Personalities, Translation Available, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-13
Updated: 2012-03-13
Packaged: 2017-11-01 21:57:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunless/pseuds/sunless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim, bruised and battered, knuckles raw and eyes bloodshot, telling a crowd of men the words they've been waiting to hear their whole lives.</p><p>"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Искусство падения](https://archiveofourown.org/works/706769) by [seventy_nine_percent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventy_nine_percent/pseuds/seventy_nine_percent)



> This work has been translated into Chinese by [NakyC](http://archiveofourown.org/users/NakyC/pseuds/NakyC) and can be found [here](http://www.mtslash.com/viewthread.php?tid=55347).
> 
> This work has been translated into Russian by [семьдесят девять процентов](http://ficbook.net/authors/%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%8C%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%8F%D1%82+%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C+%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2) and can be found [here](http://ficbook.net/readfic/417149).

He said his name was Jim Moriarty. He was wearing a £1000 suit in a dingy pub. Not drinking but sitting on a stool smoking a cigarette. He was small and wiry but commanded his space in a way that made him seem taller, broader. When he spoke his accent was strange, some words stretched out, some clipped and shortened.

The night I met him, I had not slept for three days. The cocaine was humming under my skin, beautiful and far-away, like the fading notes of a string concerto on the wind.

*

You check the time. 2:56am.

You fall asleep and dream you are standing on a ledge.

You watch your feet edging forward. Stepping off.

You jolt awake.

3:05am.

*

I stand at the front of the room. I say my name. I say I am an addict. They all answer hello, welcome. There is no pressure to tell your story. You can give away as little as you like. I sit down and close my mouth before it can say, "It's been two weeks. I don't remember how it feels to fall asleep."

Later, around a circle, they share tales of botched robberies, prison stints and spreading your knees for the next hit. Broken families, sleeping on streets. Selling everything you own, fucking over everyone you know. Waiting in dark alleyways shaking, shaking. And dropping to your knees for that next sweet hit.

Boring. Predictable. These people's lives are a parody and they don't even know it. Their lives are the punch line to a joke I've heard a million times. Everything they do has been done before. Every word they utter is a copy of a copy of a copy.

I close my mouth before it can say, "The mess of your little lives. Your little minds. How can you stand it?"

At the end, we get into pairs. I am with a man who hasn't spoken all meeting. He is short, dirty blond, leaning heavily on a cane. Closely cropped hair, rigid stance. Soldier, my mind supplies. Tan lines. Afghanistan, maybe Iraq. Recently injured, recently returned. Pain pill addiction. Obvious. Out of the corner of his coat pocket, a badge peeks out with the letters RGERY just visible at the edge.

"So, doctor, how long did you get away with writing your own prescriptions?"

The words make him freeze. "Who told you that?" he demands, voice sharp.

"No one."

He narrows his eyes. "Lucky guess, then."

"I don't guess."

*

His name is Jim and he said he worked in IT. He sat in a pub with no drink and smoke curling from his lips. He sat in a pub and he left his number for me under an ashtray.

This is how we met.

*

Jim works at night. When the city is asleep and the roads hushed, Jim is in a room on the ground floor of St. Barts Hospital updating the hospital's databases, cleaning up any discrepancies. Under the fluorescent lights that turn his skin grey and translucent, Jim is staring at endless columns of numbers that stand in for patients. With the stroke of a key, he can make anyone disappear. He can bring people back from the dead or cure cancer.

He tells me all this the next time I see him. He lists all the prominent politicians with erectile dysfunction and all the ones suffering from depression. He tells me that a perky children's TV presenter who bounces around a hallucinogenic studio in time to upbeat music every Saturday morning is dying, rotting from the inside out. "Pretty soon," he says, "She'll look like Kate Winslet's skeleton, if you propped it up and made it sing and dance."

We are back in the pub where I first met him. I fill him in on the addicts' meetings. I tell him about the morning my brother found me sprawled on the floor just inside the front door of my flat. I came to with Mycroft standing over me, tapping his umbrella hard against my head, his face scrunched up like he had smelt something vile.

"You are disgusting." He'd barely moved his lips as he spoke and the sunlight in the room ripped into my eyeballs like shards of glass. "Get help or I'm suspending all your bank accounts."

Normally I would never listen to Mycroft, especially when he adopts his holier-than-thou attitude, but that morning as I heaved myself up and then moved to the bathroom to wash the vomit out of my hair, as I gave up trying to stand in the shower and slumped down, as I tried to recall the past twenty-four hours and found nothing but a void, I thought "maybe the miserable uptight git is right for once".

Jim just stares at me for a long moment. "No. Your brother is not right." He lights another cigarette. "You know what's wrong with you? With all of us? We put too much stock in self-improvement. We're scared to hit rock bottom. We're scared to fall. Forget your meetings. Embrace the beauty in destruction. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything."

Then later, after the call for last orders, after the doors close and we're ejected back into the chilly London night, Jim turns to me and asks me to hit him as hard as I can. And clenching my hand into a tight fist, I comply.

*

You sleep and dream you are falling.

When you hit the ground, your eyes shoot open.

*

I have never met anyone like Jim before.

He comes around to my flat on Baker Street and sits facing me, drinking tea from a fine china cup. He looks around at the pictures on my wall and the fancy scientific equipment I use to amuse myself when the boredom becomes too much. He eyes the hand-crafted violin imported from Italy and the rare books towering on the kitchen table.

"Look at you. Trying to live like them... Like a boring person."

He bites into the apple he's holding and glances around at the debris of my existence. All the little things that matter to me.

"But you're nothing like them, are you? You're not ordinary. You're like me."

*

Jim standing under a single flickering light in an old disused factory, what seems like acres of darkness stretching out around him in every direction.

Jim, bruised and battered, knuckles raw and eyes bloodshot, telling a crowd of men the words they've been waiting to hear their whole lives.

"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" he asks.

"If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life?" he shouts.

"You can't be afraid of dying... because that's what people DO!" he bellows and his words hit every guy standing in the room as hard and precise as bullets.

*

My brother thinks the NA meetings are helping.  He doesn't realise the only form of therapy for me now is a punch to the gut, a knee to the face. I don't tell him that an uppercut gives the same rush as twenty snorts. One hard head-butt does more for me than all the junkie hugs I got in that community centre basement.

"Like a baby," I tell him when he asks if I'm sleeping.

*

A row of shoes. A pile of belts. Shirts that had been pressed and clean just that morning now lie in a heap on the floor of the factory. And when those shirts are put back on, blood from broken noses, from split lips and torn cheeks will drip down to redden the white or mix with the ketchup stains from lunch, indistinguishable.

You spit out a tooth and watch it roll into the shadows.

Your chest heaves, your ribs ache and every breath you take delivers a sharp pain from one of your kidneys.

In this dark cavern that smells of rust and steel, you are one wrecked body amongst many. You are them and they are you. You are everyone and you are no one.

With every hit, with every new break, you can feel yourself weaken.

Your flesh won't last for much longer. Your heart struggles to keep beating.

You have never felt more alive in your life.

*

We are at an A&E.  My face is a raw slab of meat and Jim answers all the questions.

I fell. I tripped. I ran my car into a tree.

Sometimes Jim speaks for me. He's better with people than I am.

No, he says with my lips and my voice, we don't want to file a report.

*

Jim throws the first punch and then grins wildly. The other man staggers back. His first mistake. Jim is on him immediately, sensing weakness.

They hit the floor hard. Jim keeps one knee on the guy's chest and drives his knuckles forward. He hammers his fists down like machines, unrelenting, fast. The man tries to protect his face but it's useless. Jim keeps raining down those hits.

The guy manages to jam his elbow up and catches Jim in the mouth. A sickening crunch. A spray of blood arches through the air in slow motion like something out of a film. Jim only laughs as his mouth fills with red. He rolls the blood around, a shark tasting the kill, and then spits.

When he raises his head, the look in his eyes seems to go right through his opponent. With one look he sees this guy's dead-end-desk-jockey-bitch-wife-no-sex-two-bratty-kids-car-that-won't-start-life-that-won't-start-spineless-spineless-spineless existence. There is no way this pathetic excuse for a man is going to come out on top.

The circle around them draws closer, tighter.

We are all breathing in unison, shouting with one voice.

We live for moments like this.

Jim rolls his shoulders, spits again. The blood trails down his chin, catches along his chest.

The man on the floor takes one breath, two. Then goes limp.

*

Jim keeps telling me, "You are not the owner anymore. You have become owned by all the things you do not need."

So I am not surprised when I come home to my flat one day to find the front room cleared of all furniture, empty save for Jim Moriarty sitting cross-legged in the middle of the wooden floor, grinning at me like a maniac.

*

I don't break the first two rules. I don't talk about the club.

At the next meeting, the last one I attend, I simply hand John a piece of folded paper with a time and an address.

"Come, if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same."

*

John steps forward. Without his shirt I can see the healed bullet wound unfurling across his shoulder like an exploded star. His chest is marred with smaller, older scars and the muscle definition is still visible, although clearly not as defined as it had once been.

We circle each other. The men press in closer around us.

I taunt him: "Punch me in the face, John." And still he doesn't make a move.

My body is perfectly calm, my breathing slow, fists up and solid. But my mind is racing. First point of attack? The shoulder. No, he will be expecting that. Instead, drag the left leg. Slam my fist into the patella. Then when he is down, two quick jabs to the shoulder. 

I spring into action. But John is faster than I anticipate. And tonight he needs this more than I do.

He knocks me back, knocks me down. Before I can gather my wits, he has my arms locked behind my back and he is smashing my face against the concrete floor again and again.

Finally, with a wheeze that sprays out spit and blood, I manage to gasp out: "Stop."

John gets up, offers me a hand.

"Look." He points to where my head had just been taking a pounding and in the puddle of red, there's a stretched imprint of my face, smeared and ugly.

I start laughing and after a moment John joins in. Looking over at him I can tell he is not the same man who walked through the door half an hour ago. This man, who is a soldier and a doctor, a killer as well as a healer, is finally starting to come back to himself. With every wet smack of my nose against the ground, John Watson had started to remember who he really was. He had understood that inside that circle of sweaty, braying men was the complete and total dismantling of all fear.

At the end of the night, John walks out into the street, gait steady, his cane left behind in some dark corner of the factory.

*

Eyes closed.

"Am I real?" Jim asks you.

"Yes," you answer. "Of course," you say.

"Sometimes you wonder, though, don't you?"

Eyes open.

*

In the newsagent's opposite the flat, there is a headline that catches your eye. The word 'bank' and a blurry CCTV image of a face that looks familiar. Something about that profile, the set of the jaw. You get a flash of that same jawline bloodied, swinging to the side under the force of a punch. You reach to pick up the paper, to get a closer look and then suddenly Jim is there. He does that sometimes, appears like a phantom, without a hint of warning.

"Where did you come from?"

"I came in with you. I was here the whole time." He tilts his head to the side. "Didn't you see me?"

"No."

He reaches around you and puts the paper back. "Come on, then. Let's go."

You pay for your cigarettes and leave.

*

My dreams are filled with John Watson.  I am kissing him, biting his lips. I am fucking him hard, savage, and he takes every bit of it, gives just as good back. I suck new bruises over the faded ones he got from fighting. I nip at the scar tissue on his chest, map its bumpy texture with my tongue. I hold both his hands pinned above his head and, with each roll of my hips, I pull new and more desperate sounds out of his throat.

I wake up sweating, alone. When I get up from the mattress on the floor and look around my empty bedroom, my body does not feel like my own. In the back of my mind, there is a strange niggling, like perhaps I've forgotten something important.

In the living room, John is sitting on an overturned milk crate by the window, sipping a cup of tea. He turns to me, smiles. He gestures to the cup in his hands, "You want one?"

I wonder if I am still dreaming. "What are you doing in my flat?"

John's eyes widen. "W-what?" His smile hasn't faded, like maybe he thinks I'm teasing him.

"I don't know how you got in here but you need to leave."

John is completely still for a beat. And then he slams the cup down on the floor. Tea sloshes over the side and onto his hand. It must have burnt him but he doesn't even flinch.

"You are unbelievable."

As he passes me on his way to the door, I catch sight of his neck, purple with fresh, mouth-shaped bruises. The bang of the door is so loud that it reverberates around the room, caught by one blank wall and passed to the other.

I walk over to the window, pick up his tea and slot my mouth to where his had just been. Below the window, on the street, John hails a cab and gets in.

I've nearly finished the tea by the time Jim comes into the room, stretching leisurely, his body draped in a dressing gown of mine that I thought he'd thrown out.

"Hope you don't mind that I stayed over," he says, moving into the vacant shell of a kitchen to boil water for tea. "I needed somewhere nice to bring a date."

I hadn't even heard them come in last night. But the door of the second bedroom had been closed this morning when I walked past.

"Did you see him?" Jim smirks over at me. "You two know each other, don't you?"

He pours the water and steam curls around him like the cigarette smoke had all those months ago in the bar. "Oh, he is delicious, that John Watson. Ordinary people are just so adorable."

I grip the cup tighter in my hands. The niggling intensifies until it is a faint alarm ringing through my head.

*

Pretty soon the men from the club move into 221b. One day there is a couple of them, then a couple more and so on until every inch of space in the front room is filled with bodies, sleeping, lounging. Sometimes John is there but I do not speak to him.

Jim manages them like a drill sergeant. They stand at attention when he walks in the room, they don't meet his eyes and address him only with "yes, sir" or "no, sir". One morning, just before dawn, he brings in an old stereo and blasts Rossini's La Gazza Ladra at full volume. He takes wide steps and lifts his arms as he dances around the bodies lumped in sleeping bags on the floor.

"Wakey wakey, boys!"

*

Jim and I are standing by a pool. For once, I am sure it's a dream. Everything is slippery, corners are blurred and shapes are hazy around the edges.

We are talking endlessly, Jim and I, but the words wash around me, as hard to grip as the water in the pool. Something about heartburn and underwear.

I am holding a gun. Jim is standing close to me, singing a song from the 70s. I think I used to hear it on the radio when I was young.

And suddenly John is there, standing in front of us. He is wearing a bulky jacket and I want to ask him if he is cold. Strange fireflies are all around us (maybe someone left a window open somewhere) and they glow a bright red, darting all over John's chest, near his heart.

I turn to Jim. "Why are you doing this?"

He's still singing ( _stayin' alive, stayin' alive_ ) but he stops long enough to say, "I want to solve our problem. The final problem."

*

John Watson is in your bed.

He is holding a skull in his hands.

"Where did you get that?" You try to sound more annoyed than you really are.

"Found it in the back of the wardrobe." A pause. "Why do you have a skull in the back of your wardrobe?"

"He's a very good listener." You grab it away from him. "Why are you in my bed?"

"Shut up," he says, leaning forward to kiss you. And you let him.

*

There is a body bleeding in the middle of the living room, laid out in the shape of a starfish. A black-red ooze spreads out around the man's head and settles into the cracks of the floorboards.

"What the fuck is this?"

They turn to look at me standing in the doorway.

One of the men starts stuttering an answer but he is drowned out by the sound of blood rushing in my ears. I only catch every other word. "...shot...mission...dying."

And then I am screaming. I am calling them every name under the sun. I am staring every single one of them down.

"You. Fucking. Morons. Get him out of here or I will turn you all into _shoes_."

Jim's words. Jim's words coming out of my mouth and they taste like they belong there.

*

You know there are some things that Jim doesn't tell you.

He says, "Don't ask questions."

Some nights you lie in bed and listen to the front door of the flat opening and closing, men coming and going. Other nights you wake up in an unfamiliar part of town, dressed in black, mud on your shoes, a balaclava clutched in your hand. ****

Jim says, "Let me take care of everything. Trust me."

*

The insomnia comes back. I am underwater again, the world moving further and further away. And even the nights at the club aren't helping. Inside my head, there is a hurricane. Inside my head, thoughts are vanishing into a whirlpool.

I wander around the flat like a ghost. I weave through the ragtag regiment of dirty men in the living room and they don't seem to see me. I find myself in rooms not knowing how I got there and think maybe I walked through the walls. And then I laugh at this thought, laugh loud and guttural like a rusty chainsaw.

One day when I am haunting the corridor I realise that the door to the spare bedroom, the one that's been shut since Jim moved in, is ajar. The first thing I notice when I enter is all the dust in the air. The sunlight from the windows turns ugly when it hits the dirt in the corners, the grimy peeling wallpaper. On one wall, someone has tacked up a huge map of London. Beside the map, three folders are hung up, each marked with a location - The Tower of London, Pentonville Prison, The Bank of England.

Unlike the rest of the flat, which is barren, this room has a desk with a chair and a shiny new laptop. The surface of the desk is littered with sheets of paper, piles upon piles. I pick one up. A letter on expensive stationary scented with women's perfume, a sharp aroma that bites and tantalises. _My dearest JM_. It looks and smells like a billet-doux but the contents are all sums and figures, an exchange of certain information for a certain price. Business masquerading as pleasure. At the bottom of the page, the sender's initials swoop sensually, seductively  – _I.A_. Another document is from a prospective buyer for a painting by Turner. The lost Reichenbach Falls. Another is written in what appears to be Chinese, the top of it stamped with a logo shaped like a black lotus flower.

Inside the deep desk drawers, there are more papers along with neat stacks of money lined up like well-disciplined soldiers. There are dozens of passports with different covers, different colours. I open one up and find a picture of my own face staring back at me with the name 'Richard Brook' beside it. I drop it and try to slow my breathing.

A darkness lingers at the edges of my vision. I am underwater, the world is hundreds of miles above my head and I am drowning. I fall forward. My ghost body goes through the floor and into the darkness.

*

Jim has been talking to my brother. "The Ice Man says hello."

Jim has been having afternoon tea with my landlady. "Oh, Mrs Hudson makes these little tarts that are to _die_ for."

Jim has been fucking John who was mine first. Who is still mine.

Jim has been wearing my clothes, living in my flat, burrowing under my skin.

Jim Moriarty has become like a bad dream.

I am forgetting who I was before that night outside a pub when a punch to the mouth burst open my lip and my life.

But Jim keeps reassuring me.

"Don't be scared," he says in my ear. "This is the fall. And falling's just like flying except there's a more permanent destination."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all the lovely people who have read, commented or left kudos on this fic. You're all wonderful!


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